As someone with any sort of influence in a company, whether you’re a founder, executive, manager, influential employee, or anything in between, all your actions have a second order effect: reinforcing what's culturally acceptable. Whenever you do something, you’re not just doing that thing. You’re also implicitly telling everyone around you: here in this company, it is okay or encouraged to do this thing, and this is the kind of thing you should expect to have happen going forward.
This works for both good and bad behaviors. If you exhibit intellectual curiosity and honesty in your work, insist on paying attention to details, or obsess over ways to create leverage for your team, you reinforce that this is the expectation. If you’re late for meetings, tolerate broken windows, or treat people poorly, you’re also saying it’s okay to do that.
This isn’t something any company can talk their way out of. Culture is what you do, not what you say. If you drag your feet on addressing performance issues, then no matter how often you say you have a team of A players, people will internalize that this is not a high performance culture. If you try to shortchange someone on comp, then regardless of how many times you say you care about retention, they’ll walk away thinking that they can’t trust your company to do right by them, which probably isn’t great for their engagement or retention.
This is also true of others’ behaviors that you praise or criticize. If you praise or promote someone, you’re implicitly telling everyone on the team “do what they do and you will be rewarded”. This is great if the employee is a high impact individual who exhibits the values you wish to see mirrored within the company. It is less great if the person mainly got promoted because of their political savvy or really, for any reason other than impact. You might as well have declared in your next all hands that: the new best strategy for getting promoted is ceaselessly tooting your own horn instead of focusing on impact. Ditto for passing someone over for a promotion or even firing someone. Everything you do sends a message.
This was one of the most clarifying realizations I had when I first became a manager. The grey area surrounding a hard decision often snaps into black or white when you visualize the outcome if the next 100 people in the same situation were to make the same decision. Suddenly a decision that felt very difficult seems obvious.
So if you want to positively shape company culture, act in ways that embody the values you’d want from the entire team. It will serve as an unspoken guide to the behaviors that matter.